JIRA web page showing on Google search results

Question

A few months ago, we have installed JIRA (and Java, therefore) on our own web server, which is a classical LAMP hosting several websites through Apache vhosts.

We then set up the DNS zone file of our domain, in order to have the address jira.ourdomain.com pointing to the JIRA application we just installed, while www.ourdomain.com would stays as the address for our corporate website. It worked fine (after hours of reading documentations and headaches, though, since we absolutely don't know anything about Java).

But recently we noticed that this strange webpage : http://www.ourdomain.com/plugins/servlet/Wallboard/?dashboardId=10000 appears in Google search results when searching for our company/domain!

What is this page and how to hide it or completely disable it from being visible and accessible to the public ? I've been looking at /opt/atlassian/jira/atlassian-jira/robots.txt file on our server, and added "Disallow *" in it, but I doubt it has anything to do with it.

Answer 1

The solution is indeed the robots.txt file. Search engines crawler check them first before indexing a website.

For Jira, the file should be located at $JIRA-INSTALL/atlassian-jira/robots.txt, which in your case seems to be /opt/atlassian/jira/atlassian-jira/robots.txt. However, the correct syntax to disallow all sear engines is the following :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

(First line specifies that this applies to all crawlers, the second one specifies that all this domain should not be indexed)

Keep in mind that this could take a while before Google updates its search results. To make it quicker, you can Declare outdated content! (More info in the troubleshoot page)